Introduction:I'm
a retired Radar Engineer with several areas of interest. For
over 53 years I lived in Linthicum Heights, Anne Arundel
County, MD,
about 10 miles south of Baltimore, MD, right next to
Baltimore-Washington Thurgood Marshall International Airport
(BWI.) My wife, Anne, and I raised our three children there and have
been empty nesters for over three decades. In March,
2010, we moved into the Charlestown
Retirement Community eight
miles to the north of our beloved Linthicum. The average age here is
83, close to ours. Late 2011 we decided to gift our house to
our daughter. After a frantic several months her family moved in the
week before Christmas. She loves the house since she was brought up
there.

Charlestown: we
both joined a Rotary Fellowship group here that has a book drive twice
a year and also supports a local disadvantaged grade school.
In
2011 I joined the Harmonizers, a mixed chorus of about 40 residents of
Charlestown. When the Publicity charirman died I "volunteered" to
replace him. For each concert I create a flyer for display on our many
bulletin boards and restaurants, small cards for display on tables in
casual restaurants, the cover of the concert program and have the
programs printed. I also created and maintain their website. Here is
the website for the Harmonizers where several recent concerts can be viewed. The
Catonsville Short Line Railroad once served Catonsville with passenger
and freight service. The tracks skirted the north end of our campus, in
sight of our 6th floor apartment. Several of our residents created a
short video of what is now called the Catonsville
Short Line Trail.

I
was born in a garage apartment in Lakehurst, N.J. on January
22, 1928, saw the Hindenburg explode in 1937(see Remembering
the Hindenburg)(I attended a Memorial Service at the crash
site on May 6, 2007 sponsored by the Navy Lakehurst Historical Society),
and attended school in Toms River, N.J., graduating in 1946. My senior
year I passed the "Eddy
Test"
which qualified me to attend the U.S. Navy's Radar School in Corpus
Christi, TX and Memphis, TN. Oh, yes, before school I was a "Boot" at
Great Lakes NTC, near Chicago, where I learned to scrub wood floors
with a steel wool pad and wash my clothes in a bucket! I taught in the
Radar School the last 1/2 year of my hitch. Then I married my high
school sweetheart, Anne, during Freshman Week, 1948, at
Lehigh Univ., Bethlehem, PA. Our first child, Thomas, arrived
at
the end of my Junior year. I graduated in 1952 with a BS with
High
Honors in Engineering Physics, Phi Beta Kappa, then from the Univ. of
Rochester (NY) in 1954 with an MS in Physics. Gregory was born right
after I started work at Westinghouse in 1954 when we lived in Arbutus,
across the street from our current abode. Soon after we moved to
Linthicum in 1957 we had our daughter, Karen. She now lives in our old
house with husband, Richard, and our grandchildren, Sarah and Eli.

Sad
note about Lakehurst: After 88 years as a U.S. Navy base, starting in
June 1921, on October 1, 2009, Navy Lakehurst combined with McGuire AFB
and Ft. Dix to form Joint
Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst under
command of U.S. Air Force Colonel Gina Grosso of the 87th Airbase Wing.
She was recently promoted to Brig. Gen. and has been replaced.

Career:
I worked as a Radar System Engineer at Westinghouse
(originally Air Arm Division) in Baltimore (now a part of
Northrop Grumman) for 38 1/2 years, retiring in
1993. I worked on developing advanced radars for the
F-4 fighter, the BOMARC missile and the Airborne Warning and Control
System, AWACS, all of which use a technique called Pulse Dopper to
separate the target from ground clutter. (a Google search for AWACS
gets almost 1.8 million hits) In October, 1972 Westinghouse won a
flyoff competition against our arch-enemy, Hughes, to build the radar.
Besides the USAF, AWACS are in service with NATO, Great Britain, France,
Saudi Arabia and Japan. Australia has a spin-off version that is
electronically scanned in azimuth. To quote the late Drew Middleton,
former military analyst for The New York Times: "They used to send in
the Marines-now they send AWACS." In 1980 I took an Icelandic
Odyssey
aboard an Air Force AWACS to check out an improvement. The picture was
taken at Tinker AFB, Norman, OK, AWACS home base. On August 30, 1983 an
AWACS visited
Westinghouse to celebrate the delivery of the 50th AWACS.
Left to right: Gus Cole, me, and Tom Fell, Gus and Tom were
key
AWACS
contributors, both deceased. In 1986 I was honored to be listed in
"Who's Who in America." In 1995 Bob Cowdery, AWACS Program Manager for
many years, and I were
honored with the IEEE Pioneer Award: "For contributions in the
leadership and development of the Airborne Warning and Control System
(AWACS)" For
the Award Bob and I wrote a history of
the AWACS Radar,
published in the IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems.
(Pictures recently changed to color) In 2003 I was awarded the IEEE
Dennis J. Picard Medal for radar technologies and applications. I was invited to give a
historical paper on Westinghouse Baltimore at the June, 2011
International Microwave Symposium in
downtown Baltimore. You can read the paper here.
You can also read a 2010 interview by the IEEE about my carreer
track here.
A short slide show "The
AWACS Story" is based on the "history.." paper with added
current information about deployments, users and other non-US AWACS.

In 2012 a "Westinghouse
Song" came to light. Music and lyrics are by Schulter Morgan (1907-1979),
a Westinghouse employee, for a contest sponsored by the company in
1938. In February, 2012 I sang this song
at
a Social of Westinghouse retirees at Charlestown, accompanied by
Evelyn Chesnutt, director of the Charlestown mixed chorus, The
Harmonizers. At the February 2014 Social the song was sung by Bethany
Stiles,
mezzo soprano, Grand Niece of Naomi McAfee, a Charlestown Resident and
Westinghouse retiree,
also accompanied by Evelyn.
She also sang three songs from Broadway shows. See
and hear her here.

Westinghouse
Fellowship is
the name for the group of Westinghouse and Northrop Grumman
retirees and spouses living at Charlestown. The main activity is the
annual Social gathering in February. An updated Directory was available
at the Feb. 2015 Social and can also be viewed/downloaded online. For privacy, the username and password required for viewing are
available only to Westinghouse and NG people who contact me, see below.

Family:
Our daughter, Karen, now lives in our old house in Linthicum,
MD with computer-guru husband, Richard and our two
grandchildren; Sarah and Eli. We also have two step-grandchildren
and six step-great grandchildren in New York state. We lost
our younger son, Greg, in a traffic accident on Valentine's
Day, 2000. Our older son, Thomas, lives near the site of the
Baltimore Orioles and the Colts original home, Memorial
Stadium, in Baltimore. It was replaced by two stadia(?) in
downtown Baltimore and was razed a few years ago to make room for a
senior citizens' home. Linthicum Centennial: 1908 was the year that the Linthicum
brothers started to turn their farmland into a bedroom community for
Baltimore and the surrounding area. In 2007 a bunch of us Linthicumites
formed a committee to formulate events to celebrate the 100th
anniversary of this event. Unfortunately, the web site with pictures of these events has been taken down.

ThePerforming Arts Association
of Linthicum: PAAL
is a subscription organization that puts on mostly musical performances
at the North County High School in Ferndale, MD. In the 2014-2015
season (33rd) PAAL presents five subscription concerts
and a
free concert by the U.S. Navy Band of Washington, DC. Plus
additional concerts in cooperation with the Anne Arundel Concert
Association in Severna Park the South County Concert Association in
Harwood. I was treasurer for 23 years and am
currently
the webmaster.

Genealogy:
In retirement I finally have some time to delve into my family's
ancestry. I am a 7th great grandson of
Thomas Skillman, who came to America in 1664 with the Duke of York's
expedition, which forced the Dutch to surrender New Amsterdam to the
English who promptly renamed it New York. (Not a shot was fired!) He
was rewarded with land in New York, married and raised a family.
Virtually all Skillman's in America (except descendants of slaves who
took their master's surname) are descended from Thomas. In 1906-08, my
4th cousin, three times removed, William Jones Skillman (1835-1914),
published the descendants of Thomas in a genealogy quarterly. I have
continued his work with the aid of many people who have sent me their
family information. You can find out more at my Skillman Genealogy Sitewhere over 12,000
descendants of Thomas are listed, including 5655 Skillmans.

Anne was born in Paul Kimball Hospital in Lakewood, N.J. and lived in
Beachwood and Toms River, N.J. We both were schooled in Toms River
Grade and High School, meeting when we were in grade school. We both
sang in the Junior Choir in the Methodist Church. She studied to be a
Medical Technician at the Franklin School of Science and Arts in
Philadelphia while I was in the Navy. After our marriage she worked for
a doctor in Allentown, PA until our first son was born, delivered by
the same doc. After the kids were all in school, Anne started
writing the Linthicum news for the Maryland Gazette (America's oldest newspaper - founded
1727).
After several years the paper asked her to come to work at the office.
She wrote on many topics such as funerals, weddings, ship launchings,
etc. Then, in 1970 they convinced her to write a weekly column. When
she retired in 1994 she had written 1180
columns titled Conversations
with Anne Skillman. I have converted some of them
to electronic format. Her first year's columns can be viewed by
clicking here. You may need to download the free
Adobe Reader from www.adobe.comto read the PDF file. Or, a smaller,
faster-loading reader,Foxit
Reader, is my first choice.